Note to instructors
This assignment is designed to help students consider the structure and development of their arguments as they revise drafts. To this end, it is intended to help students learn to read their own work more critically, identifying gaps in their logic and/or evidence that is lacking. It can work as either an in-class or a homework exercise.
This document is intended to serve as a shared resource for instructors in the Harvard community. Please feel free to download and adapt it for your course. If your students ask about its origin, please attribute it to the Harvard College Writing Program.
Handout for students
Outlining the Argument of Your Draft
Rewriting effectively means reading what you have written with a stranger’s eyes to see if there is a clear . . . trail of exploration that runs through the draft . . . .
I have found one organizational technique more effective than any other in revision: anticipate and answer the reader’s questions. Any piece of writing is a conversation with a reader who interrupts to say:
“How come?”
“How do you know that?”
“Says who?”
“I don’t get it.”
“What do you mean?”
- Donald M. Murray, The Craft of Revision (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Publishers, 1998), 104, 108.
Assignment: Please write an outline of the argument of your most recent draft.
One of the most successful strategies for revision is to outline your essay after you have devised an initial structure and completed a draft. This process helps you to identify the development of your argument and the transitional strategies that are best suited to each paragraph and to the paper as a whole.
Outlining can help writers make the purpose of each paragraph and the progression of their ideas more transparent for their readers, but not all outlines are equally helpful. Some tell you what you need to know in order to structure your essay effectively. Some do not, such as outlines based on "topics" and consist mainly of nouns or noun-phrases. To avoid this trap, use verbs and descriptive phrases to express the points you make. While topics deal with the “what” of the essay, points are motivated by the “why.” Points might include claims, questions, and problems, and even include the specific evidence you use—and how and when you use it.
The purpose of the outline is to help you identify gaps in your argument and restructure your essay. Once the main ideas of the essay are articulated, it is easier to see how an essay could be better structured by noting the specific claims of the argument, the relations among the individual paragraphs’ claims, and the evidence that will be necessary to support these claims.